Today Microsoft announced a number of upgrades to its Windows Live Hotmail service, the web email product previously known as just Hotmail. Included in the upgrades is more storage - free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage. The free 5GB is nearly double what Gmail currently offers (officially 2500 MB, but my account currently shows 2888 MB). Check out the Windows Live Hotmail blog for full details of the upgrades.
At a high level, what is of interest is how the Windows Live set of properties is being (very) slowly integrated. At the end of June Read/WriteWeb interviewed Brian Hall, General Manager for Windows Live, about the announcement of its "next generation" of Windows Live. Part of that is having a consistent header across Windows Live services. Here is the Hotmail iteration of this:
This morning Techdirt posed an interesting question: is there any need for the concept of a TV channel anymore? With the rise of TiVo, which allows users to watch time-shifted content on their schedule, downloading, which lets people download television shows (not always legally) whenever they want, and now IPTV (like Joost), the traditional channel model may be falling by the wayside.
As Techdirt notes, the idea that the channel is an outmoded format is gaining steam, "especially in the UK, where some are wondering why they should wait many months for American TV shows to show up on UK TV when they can (or will soon be able to) simply watch the shows online at the same time everyone else can."
Google and Universal Music Group will be partnering with gBox, Inc., an online music retailer, to sell DRM-free music tracks via Google search results. gBox, based in Apple's backyard of Cupertino, California, will begin selling Universal tracks, sans DRM, via their web site on August 21. Universal will purchase text ads on Google's searches to direct searchers to gBox sales pages.
Though Universal will also sell music without copy protection through Wal-Mart, Best Buy Digital Music Store, Rhapsody, Transworld, Passalong Networks, Amazon.com and Puretracks, only gBox will benefit from their Google search advertising. Tracks will cost $.99 each, which undercuts iTunes by 30 cents for DRM-free music.
Just a quick update to this week's poll, which is already rocking. The question is: What is your favorite online music streaming service? Right now last.fm and Pandora are nearly neck and neck in the vote, followed by Yahoo Music. But a couple of updates to the poll:
1) We added FineTune and Live365, as they were mentioned several times in the comments to the original post. So if one of those is your favorite, please go ahead and vote for it now.
2) We removed eMusic, as it is not a streaming service (apologies for that).
A new technology profiling web application from Australia, BuiltWith.com, launched today. BuiltWith.com is an interesting site that reveals the behind the scenes technology that powers any web site. Unlike statistics websites, such Popuri, BuiltWith.com is not concerned with how many visits a page gets or its Google PageRank (though it does include very rudimentary statistics estimates from Compete).
Instead, it peers under the hood to see what sort of technology is being used in the creation and delivery of the web site. "BuiltWith.com's goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves," says founder Gary Brewer.
This week's poll complements our special series on Online Music. We're asking what is your number 1 favorite music streaming service on the Web. With this poll there are bound to be sites that aren't on the list, but which are somebody's favorite. We've included as many of the major services as we could remember, but do shout out in the comments if there's an obvious omission.
Every week we have a feature called Read/WriteWeb Files, in which we investigate a current hot topic or company in Web technology. This week we're going to focus on Online Music, something that is becoming more and more prevelant as broadband speed increases and social software functionality gets better. Our network blog on digital lifestyle, last100.com, will also be focusing on Online Music this week and AltSearchEngines will list their Top 10 music search engines. So I'm quite excited by what we'll discover over the following 5 days about online music!
When you think of music on the Web, there are roughly three main eras:
A New Zealand-based social network, iYomu, is launching globally today with a US$1 Million challenge. iYomu is branding itself as a "social networking website for grown-ups" and the site is restricted to those over 18 years old. The name of the site, iYomu, stands for "I, You, Me and Us". Its aim is to provide a social networking space for the older generation, who may be turned off by teen hang outs like MySpace and Facebook.
To celebrate its global launch, iYomu.com has announced a competition where its online community will choose one member to receive US$1 million in the iYomu.com Challenge. More on that below.
I met the iYomu founders recently in Lower Hutt, New Zealand - my home city. It's not often I meet a kiwi web startup going after a global market, so this was a pleasant surprise.
The Google Operating System blog noted that Sun's StarOffice suite of productivity tools has been added to the free Google Pack offering. StarOffice is a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, as it is a full suite of desktop-based office apps that normally retails for $70. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats, except for the formats introduced in Office 2007. It is however only available to Windows users.
As Google Operating System pointed out, Google is not using OpenOffice; an open source project sponsored by Sun based on StarOffice's source code, released in 2000. GOS states that "the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org [is] that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration."
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Also our sister site last100 has a Weekly Wrapup too.
This week's feature series was on Google's efforts to implement personalization into their product range.
This week's Web Product of the Week is Animoto: Video Kills the Slideshow.
